On Media, Anthropology, and Technology

Cinemagraph

I decided that with all of the animated GIFs being posted to DS106, I would try my hand at creating a Cinemagraph, which is a specific form of animated GIF, described as “somewhere between a still photograph, and a video”.

This scene in particular comes from the film “Baraka”, during the portion of the film titled “The Hard Side Of Life“. For those not familiar with the film, it is a sort-of documentary, but explaining it in any detail is hard. I highly recommend it.

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5 comments:

A simple beautiful, yet devastating moving image. Great stuff. And thanks for the link to the tutorial. I’m going to have to experiment with this and do a screen possibly. Though it’ll take way too long!

Besides the excellent cinemagraph, thanks for the link to the tutorial. I tried to do a cinemagraph this summer with Photoshop. You’d think using a powerful tool like that to create masks and create an animated gif would be simple, right? Nope! Hard, hard, hard…..hoping this will make it easier!

Thanks Ben. I tried it the way the tutorial laid out first, but something wasn’t quite working the way they had it. I had that ever-vexing problem where they tell you to make sure a button is checked, but when you actually go to do it said button is greyed out. In this case it was the “Unify” buttons. I ended up getting it done using the method one of the commenters mentioned by laying the base static image over the moving sequence and adding a layer mask to cut out the portion that I wanted to move. Basically the same idea as what the tutorial discusses, but in reverse. I had the luxury of an otherwise static shot, so it probably wouldn’t work if there’s panning or too much unnecessary motion.